Robotic open-architecture technology for cognition, understanding and behaviours

Università di Genova - Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna - University of Zurich - Uppsala Universitet - University of Hertfordshire - Instututo Superior Tecnico - Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne - Telerobot S.r.l. - Fondazione Europea Brain Research Institute - Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia - University of Sheffield

Robot-cub scientific goals are:
(1) to create and open physical platform for embodied research that can be taken up and used by the research community involved in embodied cognition.
(2) to advance our understanding of several key issues in cognition by exploiting this platform in the investigation of several cognitive capabilities.

This will be achieved through a program of experimental research, drawing on our broad multidisciplinary background in human developmental psychology, physiology, cognitive robotics, mechatronics, and perceptual science. To achieve these goals an embodied system will be constructed able to learn how to interact with the environment through manipulation and gesture production/interpretation, and how to develop its perceptual, motor and communication skills to perform goal directed manipulation tasks. The embodied cognitive system (the CUB) will be shaped, physically and mentally, like a human child and it will be designed as an open system.
This objective will be achieved by jointly designing the mindware and the hardware: the CUB, with the goal of providing the scientific community with a set of physically instantiated tools indispensable to study cognition. The mindware of Robot-cub will be designed taking inspiration from the way human children progressively learn about their own bodily skills, how to interact with the external world, and eventually how to communicate with other individuals.

In order to foster the adoption of the CUB platform by other scientists Robot-cub will use 25% of the budget to:
(1) create a support and training site where copies of the platform will be maintained;
(2) build several copies of the robotic platform to be used by other laboratories as a part of a research grant resulting from
(3) a competitive call for proposals launched to stimulate a second wave of research in cognition. Non-EU groups working on embodied cognition will actively participate in CUB design and scientific decisions

Project Budget: 9.200.000,00 euro
Duration 01/09/2004 - 31/08/2009

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